Still over-thinkin'.
Apr. 29th, 2009 03:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI fell behind on Tribe after having such great momentum on it because I spent days hammering my head against how to wrap up arc 4 once I'd gotten to the essential end point of John's quest... and then I realized, that was it. The point of the arc was there, out in the open. The question had been answered. Not all the questions, but it is an ongoing story and it does have a developing myth arc. John found his answer... what he does with it is its own story entirely. There's nothing more to say about it at the moment, so arc 4 is finished.
Not much of a "conclusion" or "resolution", but Tribe has ever found much of its rhythm in the shaggy dog story, even going back to the first arc.
So arc 4 is finished, and arc 5 begins. Even in the first part, the influence from my trip to New Orleans is noticeable.
I've really got to get over the overthinking problem, though, because when I'm banging my head against the wall of a story, I'm not only not writing that but I'm not writing anything else. I think I need to pay more attention to the fact that the days I get the most done are also the days I play the most Wiitendo and take the most bubble baths. If I'm not getting anywhere on Story A, I need to clear my mind, come back, and open Story B.
Not much of a "conclusion" or "resolution", but Tribe has ever found much of its rhythm in the shaggy dog story, even going back to the first arc.
So arc 4 is finished, and arc 5 begins. Even in the first part, the influence from my trip to New Orleans is noticeable.
I've really got to get over the overthinking problem, though, because when I'm banging my head against the wall of a story, I'm not only not writing that but I'm not writing anything else. I think I need to pay more attention to the fact that the days I get the most done are also the days I play the most Wiitendo and take the most bubble baths. If I'm not getting anywhere on Story A, I need to clear my mind, come back, and open Story B.
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no subject
on 2009-04-29 08:34 am (UTC)Shared struggle
on 2009-05-03 07:51 pm (UTC)In a weird way, I find this inspiring.
I work as a freelance web app developer[1] (#footnote1), and I run into the same problems (and the same solutions—yay Wii!) I can handle it when I'm working for a client and I have deadlines and hours to keep; in those cases, I'm actually more productive working from home than on-site. But it gets a lot harder when I'm working on personal projects.
So the fact that an author I admire, in a similarly open-ended and self-employed situation, is struggling with this same stuff and succeeding—this gives me hope. Please keep up these behind-the-scenes (http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/tag/behind+the+scenes) posts. They're enlightening.
By the way, here are some tricks that help me. Maybe some of them will be useful to you too. If not, gleefully ignore. ^_^ Sorry if I'm saying stuff that's obvious, or that you already do.
I always work in forty-five-minute sprints, followed by a short break (say, a Katamari level, or a Tale of MU). I bill my clients by the quarter-hour, which makes this easy. I got this idea from a time-management specialist when I was working on two contracts at once and going nuts; she said industrial psychology research shows that 45 minutes is the period after which your cognitive abilities go downhill but your death-grip on the project spikes (much as with Ian's peak in the gladiator story). It also makes you focus intently on getting something done in that sprint. Sorry, I can't cite sources, but this really works for me.
I work out every day. It consistently does amazing things for my brain. If you're able to do anything that gets your heart rate up, it really cleans out the cobwebs.
I also lift weights, and I think that has a qualitatively different effect on my mental clarity, but for health's sake it's mostly superfluous.
I keep to a strict workday, after which I plan something fun. Depending on how extroverted you are, this could be made to work with a variable sleep schedule, I guess.
This is another thing I got from the time-management sessions, and it sounds duh-obvious, but it's effective. The hard part is sticking to it. When I do, I find the evenings off keep me from getting burned out, and the finite workday makes me really focus my work ("What can I get done between now and n o'clock?")
Not rocket surgery, but I hope there's something in here you can use. I know I've learned things from your posts, even from your fiction. Good stuff.
[1] By the way, if anyone is looking for a Catalyst or other Perl web developer, please drop me a line (mailto:felix.tamen@gmail.com); I'm looking for gigs. I do the whole web app shebang: Unix sysadmin, Apache/mod_perl setup, database design, UI design, back-end Perl and front-end XHTML/CSS (including AJAXy stuff). I'm also happy to do a subset of these, or to help with your legacy codebase. Here is my condensed résumé (http://fairpath.com/quinn/resume/Quinn_Weaver_Resume_Condensed_AE.txt).
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